Over the past few weeks I’ve really gotten into Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. Gordon Ramsey is probably now one of the best known celebrity chefs in Britain, and soon the world judging by his current exposure on Hell’s Kitchen.
Each week in ‘Nightmares’ Gordon goes into a different struggling restaurant and offers advice, help, swearing and encouragement to get them on their feet and moving towards a better future. With his experience in many top restaurants, both successful and unsuccessful, he has seen it all and knows what works and doesn’t work – what makes this must see TV is that he is certainly not afraid to speak his mind, often swearingly unafraid, yet he tempers this with a genuine caring attitude towards helping everyone to be their best and achieve their goals.
Each week a number of similar themes come through based on his experience; keep the food simple, make sure your customers know about you and communicate effectively all the time. All of these seem really obvious, but what’s amazing is that in each of the restaurants he’s visited so far they all fall down on this in different ways. Watching Gordon preach his gospel is compelling viewing, and won’t just help you if you run a kitchen.
For example, Ramsey’s rules definately apply to online web services. At the moment there are definate movements towards the ‘keep it simple’ approach to user interface design in many of the bright, young things getting a lot of press these days. Making sure your customers know where you are and what you do is the realm of any number of search engine optimizers (SEOs) and as for communication, well that’s pretty obvious, but the trick is mediating between different skill sets in a business and ‘translating’ so that everyone is aligned and working effectively on their part.
Now the next question is whether anyone in the computer industry is as charismatic as Mr Ramsey to get their own ‘Dot Com Nightmares’ show…